What 18 Years of Teaching Movement Has Taught Me About Pain

The part of you that's in pain is never acting in isolation.

That's the biggest shift in how I understand pain now versus when I started teaching eighteen years ago, and it's the thing I come back to with every single person who walks in pointing at one spot and asking me to fix it.

The way I describe it to my educators is that you have to look up and down the chain. If someone tells me their low back hurts, I'm not just looking at their low back. I'm looking at their feet, their ankles, knees, pelvis, their ribs, their neck and spine, their posture. I'm evaluating their breath. I'm watching them move in more than one plane of action. My job is to read the whole person, not the one part of them that's raising its hand.

"The scalpel is for the surgeon." — Marie Jose Blom

One of the clearest examples I can give you is a private client who came to me with debilitating knee pain. She hadn't been able to go upstairs in her own home for weeks. I watched her walk, laid her down on the reformer, and assessed her foot bar work. I looked over at where she'd set down her things and noticed she'd been wearing mule slide shoes for years. Spoiler alert: throw yours away.

True Pilates pros know that the soles of shoes tell ALL the secrets, and hers showed supination - her feet rolling out as she took every step. That creates a disconnection to the knee stabilizing muscles and core. It became clear almost immediately that her feet and ankles were driving the knee pain, not her knees themselves. 

We started where we always start, from the ground up, with proper foot action and mobility, and that alone created relief before we'd “fixed” her knees at all. From there we moved into ankle mobility, first on the foot bar, then on the Wunda Chair pedal, then with her feet in straps. We used a WundaCore Resistance Ring to keep her knees properly aligned through the movement, placing it between her ankles to address the supination in her feet that had quietly been running the whole show upstream.

By the time she left the studio that day, she walked across the room without knee pain for the first time in years. I got a text from her later that afternoon, overwhelmed with gratitude, because she'd climbed the stairs in her own house again. We had one more session together after that, and she didn't need privates anymore.

Looking for the root of the problem instead of attending to the part that hurts is how you create real, lasting change.

I think about her often when I'm working with people who have lived in chronic pain for so long they've started to believe it's just who they are. I have so many clients who've dealt with chronic pain in their low back, neck, hips, or knees, and seen tremendous improvement, often in our group classes, using tools like the WundaCore Blocks to unwind plantar fasciitis, knee and hip pain, or low back stiffness. The Resistance Ring does some of the work my hands would otherwise be doing, guiding alignment whether you're in the studio or moving on your own at home.

Life isn't static, and it isn't linear, and neither is the human body.

Keep moving every day, even if what you can offer that day is small. You can find my classes online that start at just 15 minutes long, or find someone close to home who you trust and feel safe moving with, because that trust really is everything.

WundaLove,
Amy